King Přemysl Ottokar II earned the nickname "Iron and Golden King" because of his military power and wealth. He acquired Austria, Styria, Carinthia and Carniola, thus spreading the Bohemian territory to the Adriatic Sea. He met his death at the Battle on the Marchfeld in 1278 in a war with his rival, King Rudolph I of Germany. Ottokar's son Wenceslaus II acquired the Polish crown in 1300 for himself and the Hungarian crown for his son. He built a great empire stretching from the Danube river to the Baltic Sea. In 1306, the last king of Přemyslid line was murdered in mysterious circumstances in Olomouc while he was resting.

In the place that is now called the Czech Republic, today's "History of" country.

I would like to note here that some of my ancestors belonged to the Moravian Church:

"The Moravian Church... is a Protestant denomination. This church's nickname comes from the original exiles who came to Saxony in 1722 from Moravia to escape persecution, but its religious heritage began in 1457 in Kunvald, Bohemia, an autonomous kingdom within the Holy Roman Empire...."

"Moravians founded missions with Algonquian-speaking Mohican in the British colony of New York in British North America. For instance, they founded one in 1740 at the Mohican village of Shekomeko in present-day Dutchess County, New York. The converted Mohican people formed the first native Christian congregation in the present-day United States. Because of local hostility to the Mohican, the Moravian support of the Mohican led to rumors of their being secret Jesuits, trying to ally the Mohican with France in the on-going French and Indian Wars.

"Although supporters defended their work, at the end of 1744, the colonial government based at Poughkeepsie expelled the Moravians from New York.

"In 1741, David Nitschmann and Count Zinzendorf led a small community to found a mission in the colony of Pennsylvania. The mission was established on Christmas Eve, and was named Bethlehem, after the Biblical town in Judea. There, they ministered to the Algonquian Lenape. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania is today the sixth largest city in Pennsylvania....

"In 1801 the Moravians established a mission to the Cherokee Nation in present day Murray County Georgia that remained until the forced removal of the Cherokees to Oklahoma, and remained active there through the end of the American Civil War in 1865....."

The term Bohemian comes from the opera La Boheme and not from Bohemia. Many tourists, to their disappointment, visit Bohemia expecting to find marijuana bars and bearded youths. They would fare much better by visiting Amsterdam.

The Lenape had a seminary run by Moravian missionaries on the Tuscarawas River in what became Ohio. It was destroyed in 1782 during the American Revolution in what was called the Gnadenhutten Massacre.

Czech trivia: The village of Jáchymov in olde Bohemia has been mined since the Middle Ages for silver and other precious metals. The town also goes by its German name, Joachimsthal, which means Joachim's Valley. In the 16th century, they minted a silver coin of such purity that it become a worldwide currency. Called Joachims Thaler, the name morphed in daler and then dollar. The same region/mine also sourced pitchblende, which was found to contain uranium in the 18th century. Marie Curie set about trying to isolate/purify uranium from Czech pitchblende and wound up discovering radium and polonium in one summer. The town also used to attract tourists to enjoy the healing spring waters effused with radon gas.

The term Bohemian comes from the slang for gypsies who were thought to originate in Bohemia. Artists and radicals who affected a 'free' lifestyle and dress sense were labeled bohemians as a slur. All of which happened decades before Puccini. Claiming he invented bohemians is akin to claiming that Maynard G. Krebs was the first Beatnik.

FWIW, I am 1/4 Bohemian via my maternal grandmother, surname Vleck, i.e. "Little wolf". In the 19th century midwest Bohemian immigrants were known as "bohunks". The Bohemians are a slavic people who took their name from the Celts who settled the region before them, a tribe known as the "Boii". The Romans conquered them and the Czechs took the land after Rome fell.

Bohemia is the part of German speaking Czechoslovakia which was the second country that the peace loving British and French governments surrendered to Hitler i rather than fight, the first being Austria. It also borders Bavaria, the capitol of which is Munich.

The German Generals were ready to arrest Hitler as a war criminal if he had started war with Britain and France by invading Czechoslovakia that unprepared moment. But Neville Chamberlain saved Hitler. It was not possible to arrest Hitler as a war criminal after he was given Czechoslovakia without actually starting a war. Those German Generals had no other opportunity until July, 1944.

I remember that Bethlehem Pennsylvania had been the home of a very nice uncle. He had served as the Episcopal Bishop of the Bethlehem Diocese for 26 years. This in turn lead to my grandmother meeting and marrying a second generation German immigrant from Bavaria who was a music teacher in the Germantown area of Philadelphia.

Bohemia! Hussites, battle-wagons, the Defenestration of Prague, battle of White Mountain, and then domination by the Hapsburgs. My people are Slovaks on my maternal grandmother's side, which means we were country bumpkins, whose cousins got pitchforked into a nationality with the so-cultured Bohemians, actually, in a hotel in Pittsburgh a few miles down the road. There's a sign on the side of the street, formation of Czechoslovakia, May, 1918, right here in the Burgh. Woo!

They had a couple of centuries of glory, most of the Middle Ages, point of fact. It was only in modernity that they became first a desolation, and then a bastion of Hapsburg dominion, and a roadstead for Austrian wars with the French and Prussians in turn.